yes, the Piora Oscillation = cold wet period 5Kya interrupting hotter drier conditions
Did the old man get it backwards? Say it ainât so! haha
A more suitably scholarly view:
Cities grew for several hundred years, then dwindled as populations dispersed into the countrysideâand later grew again.
Dispersal into the surrounding countryside implies environment degradation in the âcoreâ urban areas?
Wattenmakerâs research at the site of Kazane, in Turkey, suggests that societies set themselves up for environmental disasters
Trellaâs studies in Upper Mesopotamia indicate that farming was intensified to provide more food to support growing populations. With limited transportation, cities depended on the fertility of nearby land. When populations were small, fields were left fallow biannually and used as grazing land for animals that fertilized the soil with their dung. Population growth changed this practice and potentially motivated the use of city wastes to fertilize fields. Analysis conducted on animal bones indicates that after several centuries of habitation, city dwellers no longer pastured their livestock in fallow fields, but instead moved them farther into the countryside, where their dung no longer benefited crops. All of these factors likely decreased agricultural sustainability.
Two thousand years ago, as the Roman Empire expanded across Europe, some people became rich and powerful while others were subjected and exploited. âIn some areas, the environment was devastated, as deforestation and the depletion of mineral resources became major problems,â says Trella. âUrbanism led to the increased spread of disease and declining health for many.â
in southern Mesopotamia, deforestation, soil erosion, and salinization of the soil weakened Sumerian city-states, leading to foreign conquest and the northward shift of Mesopotamiaâs cultural centersâŚenvironmental devastation and endemic warfare ultimately led to conquest by outside forces after about 2350 B.C.E.
Oh wow. You mean that all this hype about humans killing the world started over 4 million years ago? Seems amazing that the world has not melted or imploded or something by now⌠or maybe it is better made and self healing than scientists accredit it. Which would be quite fantastic if it was not specifically designed and created. And, just maybe, we havenât got the foggiest idea what actually happened in prehistory, just a lot of folk tales and conjecture.
Single language? Single parents? Single race? Single religion? Yeah!
Keep going though, this is quite compelling in a surreal way.
Richard
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Not sure humans have ever been consciously âenvironmentally mindedâ
In the archaic past, our collective âfootprintâ was too small to âtrample all the plants along our wayâ but Iâm not sure hunter-gatherers âwatched their stepsâ all that carefully
to become true stewards of our biosphere would probably be to develop a whole brand new skill & ability
claiming that we can find the true way back in the stone age may be deeply misleading
rather, humans have never ever been (or had to be) truly environmentally conscious⌠we have to now because only now are we capable of collectively affecting our environment so thoroughly
Isnât it? One of the wonders of the internet age âŚ
So an article in UVA Magazine and a link to an outline of a chapter in an AP World History textbook are more scholarly than original research papers in academic journals?
Again, the deforestation that you cited was in Upper Mesopotamia, and a severe drought like the ones that occurred at 2200 and 3200 BC is equally likely to result in the death of trees. The bottom line is that youâre ignoring whatâs right in front of your eyes âŚ
Genesis 1-11 was not the first thing written in the Bible, despite the fact that it comes first. Biblical scholars have long hypothesized that it was composed during the Babylonian Exile. The myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is the closest ANE parallel to the story of Babel. The myth was composed during the time of Shulgi of Ur, who completed the Great Ziggurat of Ur begun by his father. Nabonidus was busy restoring the same ziggurat while the remnant of Israel was in Babylon. To me, this seems like more circumstantial evidence that the story of the Tower of Babel was composed during the exile as a polemic against Neo-Babylonian culture and royal ideology. Your mileage may vary.
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Few things i consider when thinking about this prehistory storytelling. Itâs believed that Moses wrote these through divine inspiration and from the stories orally handed down until they begin to be wrote down. The story in question is genesis 11:1-9.
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It mentions that all the people of the world spoke one language. Their understanding of the world was not like ours. When we think of the whole world we see this image from space of earth that is very recent. They did not have that image or understanding of the world. Even in the first century that is not the understanding Paul had of the whole world. Paul believed that the apostles succeeded in preaching the gospel to the whole world. The Torah in general, even when referring to the whole world, and humanity as a whole, has consistently held its magnifying glass over a small amount of people. So I believe that this whole world was primarily from the perspective of the Semitic tribes point it view in a specific region.
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It states that they settled in a land and that they made bricks and mortar. Early people used all kinds of things for fire from mushrooms to plants. The size is not literal. For one God does not live in space. Heâs not actually living on top of clouds or on top of a dome. This was the analogy they understood. So the issue was not that humanity was actually going to build something so large it reached the heavens and allowed us to possibly overthrow God and his kingdom. We fly spaceships after all and we have not hit some flying kingdom or slipped through a worm hole into a another dimension. So just like eating from the tree, itâs not the action itself thatâs necessarily evil but the heart intention. The story points towards a concept that the people was doing the opposite of what god earlier.
Genesis 1:28 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, âBe fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky.â
Instead they turned their focus towards the notion that they should not subdue the earth and multiply but focus on subduing the heavens. Which they never could.
- It never says what size they got to. Even the largest buildings we have now starts off at a much smaller foundation. They could not have been to deep into it. There is no reason to believe that the place was at its peak reaching hundreds of feet. Whatever they were doing could just as well been in its earliest stages.
So with all of that said what makes the most sense to me is to realize this is not a story about the entire globes human species all congregating into one large city and nearly completed with building a several mile high and wide tower that wood result in humanity spilling out into a floating kingdom and overthrowing God. Itâs a ahistorical tale ( fiction and truth) is lots of ancient Semitic people deciding in their heart that they could subdue the heavens and so God somehow caused them to break up and head to other parts of the region and go back to focused on the earth and probably never made it very far into their plans.